Re: BBC does it again

Nathan Sanders wrote:
In article <6bjoi1F3ajnvmU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:
In article <6bfph8F3bhorjU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:

Other Englishes are different languages. Why should different languages be given the same phonemic model?
Why not come up with a different model for each individual speaker? It
Indeed. Why not?

If you happen to come up with the same phonemes, great. If not, no big deal. If two speakers have different minimal pairs, then I see no reason why their phonemes should be the same.
Typically they don't, and this is all beside the point. I'm talking about not discarding the ability to generalize a phonemic system to as broad a group as possible, which you don't seem to want to do.

What I'm wary of is confusing diachronic and synchronic analyses, as phonologists have been doing since, well, since phonology has existed.

Related languages/dialects arise via language change. Deciding where to draw the line between active processes and historical (but yet still transparent) change can be tricky.

Are Northern Cities speakers actively fronting /A/ to [a] (pronouncing "block" much like standard "black"), or is their phoneme /a/, represented differently than the standard phoneme /A/? What data do we use to tell the difference between these two analyses?

I know of no science whose practitioners aren't interested in finding models that cover the broadest domain possible, so why you're happy to go changing the phonemic representation every time someone's phonetic realization is a little different from his neighbor's, even if doing so obscures the fact that they have two identical phonemic systems, is beyond me.

Because I'm not comfortable deciding what counts as "a little different" and what counts as "sufficiently different". Are you? If I pronounce a set of words with [E] and my neighbor pronounces the same set with [e], is that "a little different"? What if he uses [i]? What if I use [@]? How far apart in the vowel space can our realizations be for you to still think they are "a little different"? What objective, repeatable criteria are you using to decide this?

If the approach used is to determine whether the minimal pairs are all the same--whether the two people's phonemic systems are isomorphic to each other--then it's more of a binary judgment: either they are or they aren't. I thought that would be an easier judgment to make than whether the phonetic realizations differ "a little" or "a lot" between two people. I am beginning to appreciate the difficulties involved in trying to get a model to encompass more and more people, and why doing so isn't the overarching goal I had expected it to be.

So do cot-caught merging dialects have different phoneme systems, so they have nothing to distinguish /O/ from /A/? If so, do we still need to be beholden to the parts of the phoneme system that seem to overlap with the non-merging dialects? If so, why not have the same requirements for French and Spanish?
OK, in that case, perhaps you can't maintain the model. That's a different proposition.

Can people in whose speech certain phonemic distinctions are no longer discernible be said to maintain those distinctions in their underlying cognitive model if they recognize the significance of those distinctions as used by others?

It depends on what you mean by "recognize". For most people who merge cot-caught, they can tell that other speakers are making different vowels in "cot" and "caught", but would not generally know if the vowels are being used correctly. That is, the recognize that a distinction exists, but they can't reliably identify the distinction correctly.

For example, if a New Yorker called Don with [dOn] and Dawn with [dAn], the mistake would go unnoticed by a typical Californian, even if the New Yorker had called them with the reverse names earlier in the day.

OK, that's interesting. I'd been curious.


I'm not quite sure what you mean by the brain modeling the pairs. What aspect of the pairs do you think needs modeling? That speakers think of, say, [E] and [e:] as "the same thing, only different in length"?
Well, for example, some people must have thought length to be a significant enough characteristic such that, given [ɑ] and [a:], or [?] and [a:], they thought to use the same letter for them, perhaps doubling it (Dutch, Japanese hiragana) or putting an accent over it (Hungarian); and they did so consistently for e, i, o, and u (except that Dutch has "ie" for [i:]).

Just as we do in English, with "silent e" and doubled consonants distinguishing our historically long and short vowels?

Exactly, except that English is such a muddled affair that I chose not to use it as an example.
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